Grandfather Says: The Benefits of DIY Housing

Readers: This article kicks off a new quick-read series here at Len Penzo dot Com.

Grandfather sees that very few folks build their own houses anymore. But Grandfather says he thinks the increasing concentration of US housing in the hands of wealthy owners, who then effectively control them as rentals, may make some of you enterprising youngsters think about revisiting do-it-yourself house building.

Then, starting in 1977, Grandfather and his sons built a house of Grandfather’s own design — from scratch.

As you can see, Grandfather never tells anybody to do anything he hasn’t done himself.

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About the Author: RD Blakeslee is an octogenarian from West Virginia who built his net worth by only investing in that which can be enjoyed during acquisition and throughout life, as opposed to papers in a drawer, like stocks and bonds. You can read more about him here.

Comments

The family lived in the house while we built it and other enterprises( e.g. establishing a cattle herd) stretched the construction time out some. Also, some of the details, e.g. a massive stone wall in the great room, were labor intensive couldn’t be done quickly. “One stone at a time”, so to speak.

But we started the house in June 1977 and were occupying it by November.

Thanks for the article, I enjoyed reading it. Several people in our neighborhood had Sears & Roebuck prefab homes. The Sears & Roebuck catalogs were great in the forties. It was fun looking through them. Some of the other things that we might find odd in a mail order catalog today were common place then. Live baby poultry, bees and bee keeping equipment, trusses and corsets, horse harness and saddles, farm equipment, guns and almost everything needed for country living.

Sears & Roebuck was the Amazon of their day. For rural people, and working people in towns, for folks living in a small village with a little country store and not much selection, Sears was a God send! You tore out the order blank (Been there, done that.), enclosed a check and sent it off in a envelope which was also in the catalog. You had to use your own stamp. Ten days or two weeks later, the item appeared on your door step. The regular catalogs spring and fall kept you up on fashion, fabrics, accessories. The Christmas “wish book” was my favorite reading as a child, and I was free to circle anything which interested me with a pen in case anyone wanted a hint of what I’d like for Christmas. What fun! I guess all that era Sears (and Montgomery Ward) executives from then are long dead, as surely they would have come up with a modern replacement for the wish book and the catalogs on the Internet and saved Sears (Montgomery Ward succumbed long ago.) from destruction by online shopping and Amazon. I have never heard that Sears has any online presence. There’s just those empty, echoing, lonely stores stocked with a sparse, non appealing jumble of merchandise, and once great Craftsman tools which now are badly made in China. We buy vintage tools at yard and house sales, getting better quality than anything Sears sells from China today. You could even buy saddles, a driving cart, horse tack, and a pony from Sears when I was a kid, but since they didn’t GUARANTEE that you’d get the beautiful spotted pony which illustrated that ad, I was not tempted. There was that disclaimer about “This may not be the exact pony which will be delivered.” Even at that age I realized there might be bait and switch and I’d get the plain dark brown pony instead of the flashy paint!

An old ca. 1900 Crescent square-head planer, which I converted from flat belt drive to 3-phase electric, planed most of my finish lumber out of barn boards and windfallen walnut logs, slabbed out on a 36 inch bandsaw, also ca. turn of the last century. My handheld belt sander is a Craftsman ca. 1970, or so. The square planer was also used to mill moldings, via a molding cutter ground to shape on a bench grinder, also old, picked out of a load of old “antiques” from a Pennsylvania barn.

The square planer could never be sold new these days – too dangerous, say those in Washington who champion our right to be protected from ourselves.

Wife and I are one of the “millionaire-next-door” type folks….and a whole lot of it is because we built our first, and later second (and current for 30 years) homes ourselves….drove every nail, pulled every wire, laid every brick, etc.

We left our parents home in our late teens with an old second hand car and a few bucks in our pockets, and retired with a 7 figure net worth, all done without any family financial help.

I learned how to do basic plumbing, electrical, and so on when we left our pretend mansion in ’09 and began renovating our much lesser rental property. Ten years later, I’m not sure I want to move to somewhere better if it means having a mortgage again.

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